The Doctor Who Invented the Vampire and Took Prussic Acid

On the morning of Wednesday, 23 August 1821, in a small bedroom at the rear of his father’s house at 38 Great Pulteney Street in Soho, the twenty-five-year-old former physician John William Polidori was found dead by his sister Frances. He had drunk a quantity of prussic acid — the substance now called hydrocyanic acid, or hydrogen cyanide in aqueous solution — from a small glass bottle that was still on the table next to his bed. He had been dead for several hours.

The inquest, held three days later at the parish vestry of St. James Westminster, returned a verdict of “death by visitation of God” — the standard medical-legal language of 1820s English coroners’ courts to record a death without naming a specific natural cause, used in this period as a polite verdict in cases where suicide was strongly suspected but not formally proven. The verdict avoided the legal and theological consequences of a suicide finding (which would have triggered burial outside consecrated ground, confiscation of personal property by the Crown, and severe social disgrace for the surviving family). Polidori was therefore buried in the family plot at St. Pancras Old Church on 26 August.

The verdict was, by every contemporary account that survives, a deliberate fiction. Polidori had been distraught for weeks. He had taken prussic acid from his father’s medical cabinet (his father Gaetano was an Italian-born tutor and translator; the cabinet contained the standard household medicines of the period, including substances that would later be considered dangerous). The acid was in a labelled medicinal bottle, used in trace quantities as a treatment for cough and digestive ailments. Polidori had drunk a substantial fraction of the bottle’s contents.

It was a suicide. The verdict was a polite lie. The lie was made possible by the family’s social connections and by the coroner’s willingness to read the limited physical evidence charitably. It was the kind of small mercy that nineteenth-century English coroners’ courts could, in certain circumstances, extend.

How Polidori had become Polidori

John William Polidori had been born in London in September 1795, the eldest son of Gaetano Polidori (an Italian Catholic Tuscan immigrant) and Anna Maria Pierce (an English Anglican governess). The family was intellectually prominent — Gaetano taught languages and translated Italian literature into English — but financially modest. John was the first of four siblings, the others of whom would have substantially more famous adult lives: Frances would later marry Gabriele Rossetti and be the mother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti.

John completed his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1815 at the age of nineteen — the youngest person to qualify as a physician in nineteenth-century Britain. The thesis he wrote, on somnambulism (sleepwalking), is now a minor classic of early-19th-century medical literature. His career, on paper, was extraordinarily promising.

In April 1816, the twenty-year-old Polidori was hired by Lord Byron as personal physician and traveling companion for what would become Byron’s extended summer in Switzerland. He traveled with Byron to Geneva. He participated in the famous house party at the Villa Diodati on the southern shore of Lake Geneva in June 1816 — the same wet summer when Byron suggested everyone write a ghost story and Mary Godwin began Frankenstein. Polidori, prompted by the same competition, started writing a short novel about a charismatic aristocratic vampire named Lord Ruthven who was, transparently, a hostile caricature of Byron himself.

The story was not finished at Diodati. Polidori took it with him when Byron, increasingly irritated by the younger man’s social ambition and emotional volatility, dismissed him from the household in September 1816. Polidori traveled across Italy for the following year, supporting himself by giving English-language tutorials to wealthy Italian families. He returned to England in early 1818, having recently passed his Italian medical board examinations, with the manuscript of The Vampyre in his luggage.

What happened to The Vampyre

The novel was published in April 1819 in the New Monthly Magazine under circumstances that would shape the rest of Polidori’s brief life. The magazine had received the manuscript from an intermediary; the editor, Henry Colburn, published it under Byron’s name, assuming that Byron was the author. Polidori had not consented to the attribution. Byron, when the issue reached him at his villa in Venice, was furious. He wrote an angry letter to Colburn denying authorship and demanding a correction.

The correction was published in the next issue, but with deliberate ambiguity — Colburn allowed it to be interpreted as a polite literary fiction rather than as a definitive disclaimer. The Vampyre circulated for the next several months under the impression that Byron might still have written it; the print runs ran into the tens of thousands; the story became the most-read piece of supernatural prose in 1819 English literature. Polidori’s name appeared on subsequent editions as the actual author. The market read these editions as the work of a hanger-on falsely claiming Byron’s work.

The reception destroyed Polidori’s reputation. He had written, in The Vampyre, the most influential supernatural story of his generation — the foundational text of the literary vampire genre, the direct ancestor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the work from which every subsequent vampire trope in English literature descends. He received almost no credit for it during his lifetime. He was dismissed by Byron’s circle as a presumptuous parasite. He was sued by the magazine for breach of contract over the attribution. He lost the suit. He was bankrupted by the costs.

What he did with the next two years

He attempted to practice medicine in Norwich, in the eastern English countryside, from late 1819 through early 1821. The practice did not succeed. He was deeply in debt — the legal costs from the Vampyre lawsuit, plus accumulated personal debts from his earlier traveling years. He had abandoned a religious order he had briefly considered entering in 1820. He was, by 1821, increasingly isolated from his earlier London literary connections.

In April 1821 he had a serious carriage accident near Norwich. He was thrown from the carriage and suffered a substantial head injury. His personal journal — preserved by his nephew William Michael Rossetti and edited for publication in 1911 — describes severe and persistent headaches, episodes of confusion, increasing pessimism about his medical career, and a growing inability to write. The journal entries from May through August 1821 are increasingly brief and increasingly dark.

The last journal entry, dated 18 August 1821, reads: Cannot work. Cannot read. Cannot sleep. Saw Father today. He does not understand.

He returned to London in late July 1821 to live in his father’s house. He spent the first three weeks of August at home, mostly in his bedroom, occasionally visited by his sister Frances. He attended one social event during this period — a literary tea hosted by a Polidori family friend in Bloomsbury — and left after twenty minutes. He did not see any of his former London acquaintances. He did not see his Norwich patients.

The bottle of prussic acid came from his father’s medical cabinet. The cabinet was kept in the dispensary room off the kitchen on the ground floor of the house. Polidori had taken the bottle, probably during the evening of 22 August, and brought it to his bedroom on the second floor. He drank from it sometime during the night of 22-23 August. The autopsy, conducted on 25 August, established the cause of death as prussic acid poisoning and estimated the time of death at between 2 and 5 a.m. on 23 August.

What the family did

Frances Polidori found the body at approximately 8 a.m. on 23 August. She did not immediately call the doctor; she went first to Gaetano, who came up to the bedroom with her, identified what had happened, and made several rapid decisions about how to present the situation to the coroner. The empty acid bottle was removed from the table by Gaetano and placed back in the dispensary cabinet before the coroner arrived. The arranging of the bedroom — Polidori’s body was laid out on the bed, in clothing he had not been wearing at the time of death — was done by Gaetano and Frances in the hour between the discovery and the coroner’s arrival.

The deception was small but deliberate. The coroner, the local physician Dr. Henry Cline, was a family acquaintance. The inquest the following day examined the body, took testimony from the family (who confirmed that Polidori had been in poor health since his Norwich carriage accident), and returned the “visitation of God” verdict. The verdict was technically acceptable medical-legal language for a death of unclear cause; it was used by sympathetic coroners in cases like this throughout the early nineteenth century.

The deception had real consequences. Polidori was buried in the family plot at St. Pancras Old Church on 26 August 1821 — consecrated ground that would have been denied him if the official verdict had been suicide. His personal effects, which would have been seized by the Crown under the suicide laws of the period, remained with the family. The Polidori family did not lose their social standing.

The grave at St. Pancras Old Church was disturbed during the building of the Midland Railway in the late 1860s, when the cemetery was partly cleared. Most of the displaced bodies were reinterred in Highgate Cemetery further north. Polidori’s bones — if they were correctly identified during the disinterment, which is not certain — are presumably among the remains now at Highgate. The exact spot is not marked.

What he left

The Vampyre survived. It was reprinted continuously through the nineteenth century. Bram Stoker, working on the novel that would become Dracula in the 1890s, owned a copy and used Polidori’s framework explicitly. The contemporary literary vampire — aristocratic, charismatic, sexually predatory, drawn from the same well-bred social class as its victims — is Polidori’s invention. The trope has survived for two hundred years through Dracula, through Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, through Twilight, through every subsequent imitation. None of them give Polidori credit.

His personal diary was preserved by his sister and her family. Frances Polidori married Gabriele Rossetti in 1826 and raised their children — including William Michael Rossetti, who eventually edited and published the diary in 1911, nearly ninety years after his uncle’s death. The diary is the basis of every modern Polidori biography. It is also the strongest evidence for the suicide that the 1821 inquest had declined to recognize.

The house at 38 Great Pulteney Street still stands. It was a private residence through the nineteenth century, was converted to small business use in the early twentieth, and is now part of a small block of commercial buildings near the southern edge of Soho. There is no plaque.

The Polidori family medical cabinet — the source of the prussic acid — was kept in the house through Gaetano’s lifetime and was eventually dispersed among the surviving children’s families. Its current location is not known. The bottle that Polidori drank from is presumed to have been quietly disposed of by the family in the days after the inquest. The verdict of “visitation of God” remains the official cause of death in the records of the St. James Westminster parish, never corrected.